Lynch used

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Mountbatten

from Ireland.

This means a political fight for the removal of the present leaders of the trade union and Labour movement, who slavishly support the bloody actions of their own capitalist class in the six counties, as avidly as they Within the howls of rage and anguish from the British ruling class, which has itself never shrunk from perpetrating the most horrific bloodbaths in the name of preserving its domination over oppressed peoples, is a recognition of the political weakness of imperialism.:

The Irish war of liberation has gathered strength alongside national struggles on a world scale-from the Basques in Spain to the Sahrawi people in the •Sahara; from the Kurds in Turkey and Iran, to the black masses of Zimbabwe.

It has also grown up along - side a developing militancy within the fish working class in the 26 countios, and a gathering economic crisis for the sectarian six county statelet.

It is this international context, along with the fact that there is little additional scope to crack down further on the nationalist population in the occupied North, that has forced Thatcher's government to turn now towards Lynch's servile capitalist regime in the South.

Lynch has until now obediently jumped to every crack of the Whitehall whip. Repressive laws against anti-imperialist movements are as vicious and comprehensive as those in the North.

One third of both the police and the army of the "Free State" are concentrated in the • border area.

And in the wake of last week's IRA actions RUC forensic scientists and interro : gators have been in the 26 counties, working hand in glove with their colleagues gardai.

But the Tories must know that for Lynch to extend this extensive tactic collaboration into a public agreement to allow 'hot pursuit" raids on the South by British troops or the wholesale extradition of supposed republican "suspects" would create a major political crisis in the South, in which Lynch would finger himselt as the imperialist puppet that he is.

For Thatcher to bring Lynch to Downing Street and demand these kind of concessions is little more than an attempt to foist the blame onto him for the continuing violence and bloodshed in the North that is the inevitable result of British imperialist oppression.

For workers, however, the lesson is clear: the task is not simply to replace British rule in the North with a Lynch-style bourgeois nationalist regime: it is to overthrow the capitalist state machinery North and South, nationalise the capitalist holdings and the banks, and establish an irish workers' republic in which the democratic rights of minorities could be guaranteed.

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